Young Libertarians Converge on DC, State Barely Survives

This weekend, about 1,500 young libertarians arrived in the beating heart of American power for the annual conference of Students for Liberty at the Grand Hyatt in Washington DC.

The event itself has grown substantially in the last four years, taking over most of the hotel with lectures on everything from Seasteading to police militarization to libertarianism’s gender imbalance, exhibitors (including The American Conservative!), and various other activities including “Pin the Drone on the Foreign Country.”

There were not one but two tapings of “Stossel” on Saturday (episode to air Thursday), the Fox Business show hosted by the former 20/20 reporter who stopped winning Emmys when he became a libertarian. The producers keep the guests–a mix of libertarian icons and statist scapegoats–secret until the last minute but the lineup is always interesting. The single most entertaining moment of last year’s conference was watching John Bolton face a roomful of livid hostility. Though the students missed the chance to inquire about his support for the since-delisted terrorist group MEK–what better way to illustrate Bush-era civil liberties abuses by pointing out the possibility that a former UN ambassador had violated the PATRIOT Act?–it was nice to see him get asked the sort of questions he never gets as a Fox News contributor.

This year the show opted for a whipping boy–woman, as it was–who could at least dish it out better than Bolton did. With characteristic decorum, Ann Coulter used her introductory time to call libertarians “pussies.”

She puts it more bluntly than most, but Coulter’s disdain for politically-skeptical libertarians is shared among many in the GOP. For the most part, the disdain is mutual. Though a “libertarian narrative” is often touted as a way out of the Republican Party’s current crisis, capturing actual self-identified libertarians–as opposed to the merely fiscally-conservative and socially-tolerant–is probably pointless and impossible, if the high-information, well-educated subset of young people at SFL’s conference is any indication. Especially if the GOP starts moving in Scott’s “solidaristic” direction. A philosophy that’s essentially about the kenosis of political power is at odds with sustainable long-term governance.

Nonetheless, despite being an elected official who accepts the basic legitimacy of government, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) was well-received. NRO’s Betsy Woodruff writes:

Most attendees tend to view the Republican and Democratic parties with equal contempt. “I think the Republican party still represents the best opportunity for bringing liberty to the political system,” Amash says, and they’re listening. His talk is punctuated with applause — when he praises the sequester, when he mentions his fight with Carney — and after laying out a simple criticism of the president and a defense of his membership in the GOP, he announces that he’d rather take questions than ramble on. …

Amash is eminently unflappable. He explains that though he supported Romney, he wanted his endorsement “to mean something.” He says that he’s received “implied threats” because of his willingness to break ranks with his colleagues and that he doesn’t get invited to fancy dinners. He explains that he supported funding the court case to defend DOMA but doesn’t support a federal definition of marriage. He argues that the rest of the GOP — the establishment, old-guard types — are the extremists and that he’s the commonsensical moderate. And he says that the party’s libertarian wing is its future.

“If it ever was a contest, libertarianism has certainly triumphed over conservatism in the battle to galvanize non-leftist students,” writes Robby Soave at the Daily Caller, highlighting the biggest way Students for Liberty has changed the landscape of campus political activism. Fresh off reading Becoming Right (review forthcoming), similar thoughts were in my mind during the conference. Binder and Wood’s sociological study of college conservatism during the waning years of the Bush administration inadvertently demonstrates what an unprecedented thing SFL has been able to accomplish. The largest national conservative group profiled by them, the Reaganite Young Americans for Freedom, has somewhere around 100 chapters. SFL-ers have corrected my exact number several times, but their total affiliates number somewhere between 700 and 800, and it was founded in 2008. That puts it beyond even Students for a Democratic Society in its heyday. Ron Paul ran for president twice after Binder and Wood conducted most of their research, and it’s entirely possible that the picture they sketch bears no resemblance to right-wing student activism today.

But while they may be winning the fight on campus, the limitations of the American political system and prospects for it taking root abroad have caused the liberty movement to devote more attention to the developing world in recent years. It’s there, the thinking goes, that libertarian ideas in practice can do the greatest good, as well as challenge the dominant humanitarian aid paradigm in places like Africa that assumes the barrier to economic development is simply poverty, rather than effective liberal institutions. Projects to create free cities are in the works in several countries, though the most well-known experiment in Honduras experienced a considerable setback in the Honduran supreme court late last year. Reflecting the new focus, Sunday’s keynote speaker was Senegalese serial entrepreneur Magatte Wade, wife of noted free cities advocate Michael Strong. In a deeply moving speech that ended with tears, she exhorted libertarians to spend time outside both their country and their self-imposed intellectual ghetto, and to cultivate more of a humanistic sensibility. It struck me as having more in common with Bacevich’s message to conservatives than yet another call for the politically marginalized to engage with a vaguely-defined “culture.” Both spoke to the negative influence of Ayn Rand, though Wade thinks a cosmetic papering-over she called “Rand with a heart” is sufficient. (Bacevich would favor ditching Rand altogether, and for his part, MBD would support her remorseless suppression.) Hard truths, but necessary ones.

20 Responses to Young Libertarians Converge on DC, State Barely Survives

This sounds like an exciting event. I’m happier today about my two-decades registration as a Libertarian than I’ve been for quite a few years– particularly in concluding from your report that libertarians are proving themselves to be as hard to herd as cats.

Libertarianism as either a party or movement isn’t going anywhere as long as it’s primarily a male party/movement. Good for them to have women speakers, but on the ground, at the township level, libertarianism is heavily masculine.

“Rand made rationality the foundation of her Objectivist philosophy. But she was in fact the slave to her vanity, egotism, pride and lust. It is heart-wrenching to watch Rand destroy her husband, who is gradually reduced to drinking himself to death while Rand and Branden conduct their liaisons.”

That said, Rand is one of only a tiny handful of writers (George Gilder? Schumpeter?) who really celebrates entrepreneurial value creation.

2. In many respects, Magatte, and most Senegalese, might be considered “conservative” rather than “libertarian” insofar as Senegal has a very traditional culture which is still intact and very much beloved by most of its citizens. That said, the pervasive bigotry towards Muslims, especially among the right-wing media in the U.S. is hardly welcoming to otherwise conservative Muslims. And, it is worth noting, that unlike the connotations that “Muslim” has acquired on the right, the Senegalese Sufi Muslims are known for a principled commitment to non-violence, hard work, and entrepreneurship,

3. With respect to EliteCommInc.’s comment, some of us actually care about global poverty. Moreover, there is no “changing foreign states” that is involved. We see free cities as a natural extension of existing free zones, thousands of which exist around the world. Chinese special economic zones have created hundreds of millions of jobs, Honduran free zones created more than 100,000 jobs. The Dubai International Financial Centre has already piloted the use of British common law in a 110 acre zone with terrific success. Despite the hysterical and misleading media accounts, city-scale zones featuring higher quality law and governance are not so exotic and are likely to come into being in the next few years. Moreover, we have proposed such zones in the U.S., including in Detroit and on Native American lands.

4. Finally, in the broader war of ideas, increasing clarity around the success of free markets, guided by the rule of law, in creating prosperity is a very significant nail in the coffin of the left. In military strategy it is well-known that one should go after the enemy’s weak flank and not direct all one’s force where the enemy is strongest. Global poverty is the issue on which the left has been largely discredited. Most development economists are too cowardly and conventional to be fully honest about the fact, but more and more are quietly admitting that free markets create prosperity. Those of us who believe in free markets and limited government, regardless of other differences, should be pushing the left hard on the role they’ve played in perpetuating global poverty for the past hundred years. In the world of ideas, the left’s long-standing pretensions to intellectual and moral superiority are becoming weaker and weaker. With respect to an issue such as national health care, this weakness is very far from apparent to mainstream scholars. But with respect to the role of markets in creating prosperity, we are on the verge of an ideological rout.

“Rand with a heart” sounds pointless. The power of markets to develop wealth is already well enough established that few even on the left will really challenge it except with pure populist rhetoric, so why lean in their direction with vapid humanism? For marketing purposes? Reaching across the aisle? Please. Make the arguments and stick to them.

Capitalism works because it demands standards of productivity while allowing sensible reciprocal altruism that binds communities together, so the anti-statist position of libertarians – and the scorning of cheap, centralist bureaucratic empathy – is the best tool they have. They water it down at the risk of their ideological identity.

You can argue that The Free Market will solve everything, but said solution looks very much like a non-solution if the time period is over 30 years or so.

Libertarianism is a belief appropriate to a 20-year old white middle-class male. Those of us who actually deal with the world and other people realize how unrealistic its philosophical underpinnings are. Libertarianism only works if you assume that people have infinite time and infinite capacity to test the trustworthiness of every new transaction they enter into.

Libertarianism: where it’s fine to have rat turds in your peanut butter as long as your customers don’t find out about it.

Look, if the free market actually worked, there would have been no reason to create the FDA, the EPA, the FAA…..

Government regulation gets pulled into existence when the free market doesn’t solve a problem and enough citizens get miffed to yowl to their congresscritters to do something about it.

You don’t like that happening, then police yourselves enough that complaints don’t happen. Why did the FDA get created? Because the existing free-market system wasn’t solving the problem. Because people think that the possibility of bringing a tort claim against a company isn’t worth that much if their pet/child/whatever is DEAD. Because it’s too expensive to bring litigation and companies were making out like bandits dumping their toxic waste in everyone’s backyard and then then shrugging their shoulders and saying “go ahead and sue us, you’ll never be able to prove that we were responsible beyond a reasonable doubt and you’re never going to be able to trace a particular chemical to us specifically as opposed to all the other manufacturers in the area.”

I think the response is simple here. My tax dollars and support of emergency grants, even international grants that are available to foreign enitities from the US government, our foreign aid packages, and believ it or not the United States military actually has humanitarian aid missions around the globe unrelated to emergency assistance and nongovernmental Aid packages, might as well mention the Peace Corps missions doing effective work for more than fity years. I support most such endeavours.

But to your quip,

1. some of us have actually been engaged in dealing with with global poverty as well as caring about it — my resume’ aside, you are not new on the issue. Economic free zones were not created by libertarians. They have been in practice since the late 1950′s becoming more formalized during the sixties and currently the capaign slogan of the enlightened. I am delighted that you recognize their value and potential.

2. You seem to be amking several assumptions:

a. I don’t know what economic free zones are
b. I don’t where they have had an impact
c. I am unfamiliar with how such systems are created
(there you may have a little traction, as to legal
structures and the like)
d. That your response in any manner addresses my
comment.

3. You have completely missed the point. I am delighted that China, Honduras, Dubai, you neglected India, Russia, the Congo, etc.

And your ad on as to proposals in Detroit, and Native American communities is at least an attempt to adress my position. Simply this: The best method of dealing with global povery is dealing with it at home. Your response is akin to that of that of the educated white youths of the meritocracy to Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King addresses structural barriers here in the US of millions of citizens who have been systematically and structurally barred . . . and the college kids say, what about Vietnam? look, your ambitions are nobel and worthy. And certainly poverty anywhere is a concern. But your family in the Appalachians, the fields of Iowa, Nebraska, Louisianna, Blue Ridge Mountains and elsewhere — right in your own back door are in desperate need of some economic freedom you are on about. And beyond proposals, get your hands and feet wet, dirty, face the contradictions right here at home. Have success here. Build here. I think the tax payers here would appreciate it. Get the country stable here so that we will be more apt to deal with matters there. After you have done some ground breaking, back breaking work here — have at it.

Be tradical at home. Transform home. Don’t tell me about proposals in Detroit. Tell me the mechanisms you tend to employ to lower the crime rate until the economy gets on its feet again? And just what about those Native American Free Zones, decribe for the structures you are implementing to empoer those communities? And just how open are they to such proposals. You want humanitarian challenges, head to Compton and convince them that economic freedom lies in dumping the sale of that dime bag for a fast food store. Head to South Boston.

As for Ayn Rand and Schumpeter, you do realize that at severaljunctures their philosophical arguments collide. Just how does one reconcile creative destruction with proprty and ownership rights of intellectual property? The libertarian concept of open source and a weakening copywrite laws are actually contrary to economic prosperity. Certainly you are not contending that communities won’t own the ideas that will bring the economic freedom.

As for the enemies weak hand. Your forray, into the economic affairs on behalf of poverty abroad is exactly what our liberal pals here want.

And I hate to break it to you. There’s no such thing as free markets. There are always rules. There are always banks, they don’t loan money freely. Just what are the plans to take on the lucrative cocaine trade, under mining econimies everywhere.

I have over responded here. But my point is here. Now I say that knowing that if I don’t get hired here, paid here I will go elsewhere, but tax dollars will still come here. Here is home. Demonstrate your brilliance here, first. That was my comment.

Ronald Reagan,
” If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood. We have government to insure that we don’t each one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves. But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are traveling the same path.”

I’m not trolling you or anything – I think we probably just disagree on these issues including the basis for regulation. The only thing I would recommend is reading two books by Gabriel Kolko (a leftish historian) – The Triumph of Conservatism and Railroads and Regulation. They are a pair of books that discuss the history of the Progressive Era and the advent of the regulatory state.

Of course, the Public Choice economists are also a good place to look on these issues.

I lost all respect for so-called libertarianism when one of their Big Dogs argued that a woman in 19th century America had more freedom than in present day America.

The fact that women couldn’t vote, were restricted from jobs (being a lawyer, for example), totally lost their legal identity upon marriage (couldn’t contract or own any property, down to the clothes on their backs), and were totally under the legal thumb of their husbands (subject to marital rape and physical abuse) was totally ignored by this doofus. He seemed to think that nagging by the wife would somehow fix everything.

“increasing clarity around the success of free markets, guided by the rule of law”

This is the most salient point of the discussion. How do you define the rule of law that must exist in the free market? Unfettered capitalism has it’s limits as demonstrated by the creation of laws and even entire agencies necessary to deal with its excesses over time. Does that constitute the rule of law? Who makes the rules? I am all for the rights of the individual as long as there is a corresponding set of responsibilities in place.

I spent fifteen years in K-12 education in the U.S., during which I increased inner city test scores on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking test (correlates with IQ), SAT-Verbal (correlates with IQ), and at a rural NM region created a charter school ranked the 36th best public high school in the U.S. on Newsweek’s Challenge Index (AP tests taken divided by high school seniors, plus our students passed the AP tests, i.e. scored “3″ or higher, at more than twice the national rate). See here for more,

I have abundant boots-on-the-ground experience actually producing outcomes in the U.S. Because of excessive control of education in the U.S., I’m not returning to U.S. education until we have a serious tuition tax credit in one of the states (for which, by the way, I’m actively supporting lobbying efforts).

In the meantime, I will continue to work abroad – and I still don’t understand at all what is wrong with that. Regarding Native American possibilities, if you know of a business model in health care that could be profitable on tribal lands in rural Wyoming let me know so that I can make that connection.

Regarding Rand and Schumpeter: My point is not that they are completely consistent. Moreover, I also have no desire to defend “libertarian” at all. But “entrepreneurial value creation” is an important category which is largely invisible to academics and intellectuals. Rand’s single greatest virtue is that she dramatically described that category. Schumpeter is also one of the few economists who described that category. Kirzner kind of sort of does, but not as well as Schumpeter. In mainstream neoclassical economics, entrepreneurial value creation is 100% invisible. The anti-capitalists in most academic departments are clueless about the crucial role of entrepreneurial value creation – to understand it would be to acknowledge the virtues of capitalism.

And of course the act of entrepreneurial value creation takes place within systems of rules. I’m not sure why anything I’ve said would lead you or anyone else to think otherwise. There is a vast and growing literature on the institutional prerequisites to effective market behavior that is critical to our design of free cities. Bob Cooter, one of the leading thinkers in this area, is one of my major inspirations. He is not a “libertarian,” but there again I have no attachment to the term. But he does recommend that developing nations “legalize economic freedom” precisely because they lack both the legal structure AND the economic freedom.